andersonfam.org

Don’t ask me how I stumbled on this.

This dude plays (via recording and looping) all the parts of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” on the Theremin. Niiiiiiice.

An excerpt from a conversation I had today with my boss over IM:

(3:39:21 PM) Erik: you’d be glad to hear that I fabricated a few gonkulators today.
(3:39:58 PM) Dan: for Boston?
(3:40:05 PM) Erik: yes
(3:40:10 PM) Erik: the T1 loopback plug.
(3:40:18 PM) Erik: …I think would classify as a gonkulator.
(3:42:09 PM) Dan: yes gonkulator, specie [sic] Toneloopicus
(3:42:20 PM) Erik: ooh – very nice.
(3:42:38 PM) Dan: thanks

You heard it here first, folks. A new species of gonkulator was coined today.

As of today, I’ve officially made an entry into the world of podcasting. Wheee!

I’ve been listening to the Geeks and God podcast for several months now. It’s a great podcast, hosted by two very talented guys – their mission is to help churches and ministries carry out their mission more effectively through the use of technology. Topics so far have ranged from CSS to open-source content management systems, to proper audio gear, to what presentation software to use in your worship services. A few weeks back, I approached the hosts to see if they’ve ever talked about VoIP on the podcast. They hadn’t. They invited me to be a guest commentator on the subject, and I soon found myself in a 1-hour recording session with them. All in all, I think it turned out okay. Of course I wish I could have been a bit more clear and that I could have talked in more detail on the subject, but that’s okay – it was just meant to be a very brief overview.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do so here. Otherwise you can go here to listen to just this one episode.

Cheers!

I just read a rather lengthy discussion on reddit about current US broadband speeds and how they’re lagging way behind most all of the asian and EU markets. They quote the average broadband (download) speed in the US as 1.6 Mbps. Japan – 61 Mbps. South Korea – 45 Mbps. Sweden – 18 Mbps.

At first glance, this looks like a huge disparity. After thinking about this for a minute, though, I started wondering what the big deal is. Sure – it would be awesome to be able to say that I had a 61 Mbps internet connection to my house, but honestly, how much of that 61 Mbps are you able to use? At home, we currently have 6 Mbps cable internet service from comcast, and at work, we’re on a full-duplex fractional DS3 (10 Mbps) from TWTelecom. No matter whether I’m at home or at work, I’m rarely able to saturate the connection. 99% of the time, I find the bandwidth bottleneck to be on the other end of the pipe (or somewhere in between).

Another thing to add to this discussion: a huge majority of the content on the internet is hosted in the US. This means that when some dude in Tokyo wants to surf Youtube over his pimpin’ 61 Mbps internet connection, the traffic has to traverse the Pacific over cramped fiber trunks – he’d be lucky to get 2 Mbps over those connections.

So – my question remains…why the big push for faster broadband speeds? Until hosting companies and the internet backbone carriers upgrade their network to push more data, it really doesn’t matter.

Am I being naive or is this somewhat correct?

Let it be known that Minnesota is the featured article on Wikipedia for May 11th, 2007.

P.S. If you didn’t understand the title for this post, please check out this (sorry – realmedia) as a hint. It’s a recording of the first song aired on The Current when it started broadcasting a little over two years ago.